Re: My version

--- On Thu, 2/19/09, tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

> From: tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...>
> Subject: [tied] My version
> To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Thursday, February 19, 2009, 4:35 AM
> 1) AFAIK American English has three main dialect groups, New
> England,
> Southern and Standard. On a map, Standard looks like it
> fanned out of
> New York, like smoke from a smokestack, with the two other
> dialects on
> the side,

Actually out of Philadelphia, where most of the settlers were Welsh, Germans and Scots --historically in that order.

with the old British colonial centers Boston and

> Virginia,
> emphasizing the role of those ports as entry points for
> later (New
> York) and early immigration. New York was originally Dutch
> speaking.
> Those are the sociological facts. There is no way that
> would not have
> influenced the phonology of Standard American. AFAIK no one
> ever
> looked at the question from this angle.
>
> 2) If one uses the standard method of locating the origin
> of a
> language family on Romance, you would point to Sardinia,
> since that
> language is the most conservative. The various Italic
> languages have
> left no trace in Italian dialects AFAIK. This
> homogenization of
> Italian dialects, I think, goes back to two varieties of
> Late Latin,
> Christian Latin on a Greek substrate, from the
> Greek-speaking
> immigrants from the east, and 'Barracks Latin' on a
> Germanic/Celtic/NWB(?) substrate. Those are the
> sociological facts.
> There is no way those substrates can't have influenced
> Romance. AFAIK
> no one ever looked at the question from this angle.
>
>
> Torsten